Mind the gap: ‘health and safety finally seem to have trumped any desire for delight in the public realm,’ says Oliver Wainwright.
Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

No ball games, no busking, no protests – and now no stream. The More London estate, which covers 13 acres of the the south bank of the Thames, providing a home for City Hall, has always been an apt symbol of the London’s creeping privatisation. Owned by the sovereign wealth fund of Kuwait and patrolled by private security guards, it is a damning symptom of the capital’s thrall to foreign investment that journalists must seek permission to conduct interviews outside its own seat of democracy.

From Olympic Park to East Bank: how St Paul's 'faux pas' led to design rethink

Read more

Now one of the few features that livened up this bleak place of grey paving, smoked glass and CCTV is being bricked up. A 260-metre long channel of water, known as the Rill, has run from Tooley Street towards the river for the last 16 years, designed, says Townshend Landscape Architects, to refer to a historic tributary that used to flow into the river. It was no work of genius, but the little trickle added interest and an unlikely frisson of danger as you walked the tedious gauntlet of M&S and Jamie’s Italian, towards the spiky Mordor-like entrance of PricewaterhouseCoopers . At weekends it was a popular place for paddling kids, and it provided a useful visual marker for lost tourists spilling out of London Bridge station trying to find their way to the Thames.

But health and safety concerns finally seem to have trumped any desire for delight in the public realm. The watery fissure has been filled in with more of the same limestone setts that carpet the rest of the development, leaving a rusticated scar down the middle of the pavement. Broadgate Estates, which manages More London, declined to comment, but the treacherous gutter has been no stranger to trips and the occasional twisted ankle, incidents that have likely increased as more of us walk around glued to our mobile phones.

“BRICKED UP,” shrieked one tabloid headline, “because millennials keep falling into it while staring at their phones.” Never mind the middle-aged tax consultants on their Blackberries, or their colleagues teetering along in stilettos.

It is not the first time that phone addiction has been blamed for having to adapt the public realm. A 20-ft statue of a pair of clasped hands erected outside Salisbury Cathedral had to be moved in 2016, apparently because people kept bumping their heads on it while looking at their phones. Artist Sophie Ryder wrote on her Facebook page: “We had to move [it] because people were walking through texting and said they bumped their heads!”

Dr Robert Titley, responsible for art at the cathedral, clarified that the sculpture was dangerous at night because it was difficult to see in the dark. “The Kiss is a particularly magnetic piece which draws you to walk under it,” he told the Salisbury Journal . “However, we have found that some people find it hard to spot at night so we have moved it off the pathway.”

Other cities have taken more extreme measures to tackle the scourge of smartphone zombies. Last year the Hawaiian capital of Honolulu made it illegal to cross the street while looking at an electronic device , introducing an on-the-spot fine of $35 (£27). The small town of Bodegraven in the Netherlands has gone for a more technocratic approach, embedding LED-illuminated strips in the pavement at busy intersections , which turn red or green in sync with the crossing lights. Meanwhile, road signs in the city of Hayward, California, have gone for a direct approach: “Heads Up! Cross the Street,” they implore. “Then Update Facebook.” It’s a simple solution that the faceless managers of More London could have done well to learn from, before burying one of the few moments of joy in their corporate campus.